Scheduling Your Dynamics 365 version 9 Update

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Like many of you that have Dynamics 365 organizations online, we received our “Scheduling Your Dynamics 365 Organization for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) version 9.0 Update” notice recently.

If you have not scrambled to get your update scheduled you still have time.

For you bleeding edge types or organizations that like a nice cushion between testing an update and going live with it, you might want to get in there and get that update scheduled for your test environment. Three days after the notice, there were dates for the end of February available. A week after the notice, the first date available was the beginning of April.

The last date I noticed, so the farthest out an update can be scheduled as of the writing of this blog, was the beginning of August. This means you can schedule your test organization update now and spend your spring and early summer running though testing scripts to prepare for updating your production instance in August. Please note, just because the last date is in August does not mean you HAVE to schedule your update now for then. You can hold off. I mention that date primarily to let folks know that will be about the time Microsoft will be getting insistent for you to update if you are on the previous version which is CRM Online 2016 Update 1 (two versions back from July 2017 Update for Dynamics 365).

Enough preamble. If you have been tasked with scheduling your organization's update, do not fear. It is actually fairly easy and if the dates you pick need to be moved after you schedule you can just go in and re-schedule (until August anyway).

First, you have to have at least one of the following roles:

Office 365 Global administrator

Dynamics 365 service administrator (a fairly new role set in the Office 365 area)

Dynamics 365 system administrator (typically set in the Dynamics 365 Settings area)

Now that you have the role, go here. This will show you the Dynamics 365 Administration Center.

Next, click the UPDATES tab on the Administration Center menu. Don’t worry you do not have to pick an instance to update yet, that is next.

Once there, click on the name of the instance to see the current version of the instance and get the link to Schedule your update.

Click the Schedule your update link and be transported to the date picker screen.

Pause button… Have you checked in with the business to verify these dates will work? If you have not I HIGHLY recommend stop here and do so. If you set this and go on about your business you will get reminders from Microsoft but at some point the organization will get updated and you don’t want to be surprised by that.

Moving on!

Use the calendar icons to pick your preferred and alternate dates. Every time I have done this the times default to 6 PM to 6 AM. This means your organization will be updated the night of/early morning after the date you pick.

In case there is an issue during the update, the alternate date is used. If there is an issue during the update, Microsoft will let you know there was an issue and can give you some indication as to why. Never fear though, if your organization cannot be updated on the preferred date it will be rolled back to its pre-update attempt state.

Once you choose your dates click the Next button, review dates you chose and click the Approve Update button.

BE PATIENT! I cannot stress this enough. For some reason this sometimes takes a little time to refresh.

If you get an error or if you are the impatient type, click back to the UPDATES tab and click on the organization name you just scheduled. If needed hit the refresh button on your browser.